From the north, the banshee shriek of sirens abruptly swelled much louder, and Marty turned to see a black-and -white police sedan negotiate that corner almost as fast as the other car had rounded the corner to the south. Revolving red and blue emergency beacons threw bright Frisbees of light through the gray rain and across the blacktop. The siren cut off as the sedan fishtailed to a stop twenty feet from Marty in the center of the street, with stunt-driver dramatics that seemed excessive even under the circumstances.
The siren of a backup cruiser warbled in the distance as the front doors of the first black-and-white flew open. Two uniformed officers came out of the cruiser, staying low, sheltering behind the doors, shouting, “Drop it! Now! Do it! Drop it right now or die, asshole! Now!”
Marty realized he was still holding the 9mm pistol. The cops knew nothing more than what Paige had told them when she’d called 911, that a man had been shot, so of course they figured he was the perp. If he didn’t do exactly what they demanded, and do it fast, they would shoot him and be justified in doing so.
He let the gun fall out of his hand.
It clattered on the pavement.
They ordered him to kick it away from himself. He complied.
As they rose from behind the open car doors, one of the cops shouted, “On the ground, facedown, hands behind your back!”
He knew better than to try to make them understand that he was the victim rather than the perpetrator. They wanted obedience first, explanations later, and if their positions had been reversed he would have expected the same thing of them.
He dropped to his hands and knees, then stretched full length on the street. Even through his shirt, the wet blacktop was so cold that it took his breath away.
Vic and Kathy Delorio’s house was directly across the street from where he was lying, and Marty hoped Charlotte and Emily had been kept away from the front windows. They shouldn’t have to see their father flat on the ground, under the guns of policemen. They were already scared. He remembered their wide-eyed stares when he’d burst into the kitchen with the gun in his hand, and he didn’t want them frightened further.
The cold leached into his bones.
The second siren suddenly grew much louder from one second to the next. He guessed the backup black-and-white had turned a corner to the south and was approaching from that end of the block. The piercing wail was as cold as a sharp icicle in the ear.
With one side of his face to the pavement, blinking rain out of his eyes, he watched the cops approach. They kept their guns drawn. When they tramped through a shallow puddle, the splashes seemed huge from Marty’s perspective.
As they reached him, he said, “It’s okay. I live here. This is my house.” His speech, already raspy, was further distorted by the shivers that wracked him. He worried that he sounded drunk or demented. “This is my house.”
“Just stay down,” one of them said sharply. “Keep your hands behind your back and stay down.”
The other one asked, “You have any ID?”
Shuddering so badly that his teeth chattered, he said, “Yeah, sure, in my wallet.”
Taking no chances, they cuffed him before fishing his wallet out of his hip pocket. The steel bracelets were still warm from the heated air of the patrol car.
He felt exactly as if he were a character in one of his own novels. It was decidedly not a good feeling.
The second siren died. Car doors slammed. He heard the crackling static and tinny voices of police-band radios.
“You have any photo ID in here?” asked the cop who had taken his wallet.
Marty rolled his left eye, trying to see something of the man above knee-level. “Yeah, of course, in one of those plastic windows, a driver’s license.”
In his novels, when innocent characters were suspected of crimes they hadn’t committed, they were often worried and afraid. But Marty had never written about the humiliation of such an experience. Lying on the frigid blacktop, prone before the police officers, he was mortified as never before in his life, even though he’d done nothing wrong. The situation itself—being in a position of utter submission while regarded with deep suspicion by figures of authority—seemed to trigger some innate guilt, a congenital sense of culpability in some monstrous transgression that couldn’t quite be identified, feelings of shame because he was going to be found out, even though he knew there was nothing for which he could be blamed.
“How old is this picture on your license?” asked the cop with his wallet.
“Uh, I don’t know, two years, three.”
“Doesn’t look much like you.”
“You know what DMV photos are like,” Marty said, dismayed to hear more plea than anger in his voice.
“Let him up, it’s all right, he’s my husband, he’s Marty Stillwater,” Paige shouted, evidently hurrying toward them from the Delorios’ house.
Marty couldn’t see her, but her voice gladdened him and restored a sense of reality to the nightmarish moment.
He told himself that everything was going to be all right. The cops would recognize their error, let him up, search the shrubbery around the house and in neighbors’ yards, quickly find the look-alike, and arrive at an explanation for all the weirdness of the past hour.
“He’s my husband,” Paige repeated, much closer now, and Marty could sense the cops staring at her as she approached.
He was blessed with an attractive wife who was well worth staring at even when rain-soaked and distraught; she wasn’t merely attractive but smart, charming, amusing, loving, singular. His daughters were great kids. He had a prospering career as a novelist, and he profoundly enjoyed his work. Nothing was going to change any of that. Nothing.
Yet even as the cops removed the handcuffs and helped him to his feet, even as Paige hugged him and as he embraced her gratefully, Marty was acutely and uncomfortably aware that twilight was giving way to nightfall. He looked over her shoulder, searching countless shadowed places along the street, wondering from which nest of darkness the next attack would come. The rain seemed so cold that it ought to have been sleet, the emergency beacons stung his eyes, his throat burned as if he’d gargled with acid, his body ached in a score of places from the battering he had taken, and instinct told him that the worst was yet to come.
No.
No, that wasn’t instinct speaking. That was just his overactive imagination at work. The curse of the writer’s imagination. Always searching for the next plot twist.
Life wasn’t like fiction. Real stories didn’t have second and third acts, neat structures, narrative pace, escalating denouements. Crazy things just happened, without the logic of fiction, and then life went on as usual.
The policemen were all watching him hug Paige.
He thought he saw hostility in their faces.
Another siren swelled in the distance.
He was so cold.
Three
1
The Oklahoma night made Drew Oslett uneasy. Mile after mile, on both sides of the interstate highway, with rare exception, the darkness was so deep and unrelenting that he seemed to be crossing a bridge over an enormously wide and bottomless abyss. Thousands of stars salted the sky, suggesting an immensity that he preferred not to consider.
He was a creature of the city, his soul in tune with urban bustle. Wide avenues flanked by tall buildings were the largest open spaces with which he was entirely comfortable. He had lived for many years in New York, but he had never visited Central Park; those fields and vales were encircled by the city, yet Oslett found them sufficiently large and bucolic to make him edgy. He was in his element only in sheltering forests of highrises, where sidewalks teemed with people and streets were jammed with noisy traffic. In his midtown Manhattan apartment, he slept with no drapes over the windows, so the ambient light of the metropolis flooded the room. When he woke in the night, he was comforted by periodic sirens, blaring horns, drunken shouts, car-rattled manhole covers, and other more exotic noises that rose from the streets even during the dead hours, though at diminished volume from the glorious clash and jangle of mornings, afternoons, and evenings. The continuous cacophony and infinite distractions of the city were the silk of his cocoon, protecting him, ensuring that he would never find himself in the quiet circumstances that encouraged contemplation and introspection.